How Do Sprinkler Systems Work?

Sprinkler systems, which can be hooked up to a hose or through underground hoses, work by the pressure of the water that sprays out of small nozzles. Understand how sprinklers work with help from a sustainable gardener in this free video series on garden... View Video Transcript

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Yolanda Vanveen

Video Transcript

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen, and in this segment we're going to talk about, how do sprinkler systems work. Well there is many different types of sprinklers. You can just hookup the hose right to the spigot and put it on any type of a sprinkler system and the water will fly up and it'll water the whole area. There are small sprinklers that work in a circle or you can have the real pole type sprinklers that will shoot in a circular motion. But any way that they work, they're giving water to your plants. And now a lot of people have sprinklers on timer systems, and it works just like a timer for a night light. And so it'll have a little clock on it, and a certain time of the day it'll turn on, and you can program it to be 5, 10, 20 minutes a day or once a week, whenever you want it to run it will run. And so what happens is that, that certain time, then it'll just activate the sprinkler system, it'll put water into the hoses that are generally underground, and then each water hose will connect to a spigot. And so the spigots on the ground, but as soon as there's water pressure and it gets to a certain point, it will come out of the ground just from the pressure and it'll shoot the water. And that works all the way down the line, so the second, third, fourth, all the sprinklers will work until the last sprinkler is activated, because there's that much water pressure. So the sprinkler closer to the origin of the water, to the hose where it starts, is going to come on first, and then the hose part or the sprinkler that's at the very end of the line will come on last. And when the timer is done it'll just stop the system, just turn the electricity off, and the water will just flow back out of the pipes, and the spigots will come back down and then you won't have water and you won't be watering anymore. So those are the timer type variety of sprinklers. But there's so many different types of sprinklers that you can use, they can be underground or they can be above the ground, they can be on a- they can roll with a pulley system, and for large, large areas, people use those type of sprinklers. But it doesn't really matter what type of sprinkler that you have, the purpose of the sprinkler is to water your yard and your garden. And as time evolves I'm sure we'll come up with some new ways to use sprinklers as well.